Entry

Intro level - I want to provide a set of four or five random responses to each different answer to a question. How do I do that?

May 17th, 2001 08:39
Philip Olson, Richard Stohlman,

Let's say you have an array full of responses, such as :
  $a = array('yes','no','maybe','never','sometimes','perhaps','hmm');
Let's create a quick function to select a few ($num) of these answers, 
many ways exist to do this such as :
  function getRandomAnswers($answers,$num)
  {
    mt_srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
    shuffle($answers);
    return array_slice($answers,0,$num);
  }
Which will return an array with $num random answers from $answers 
array.  You'll print out the elements from this array to your user, 
perhaps like so :
  function returnRandomAnswers($answers)
  {
    $t = '<ul>';
    foreach ($answers as $answer) {
      $t .= "<li><a href='foo.php?reply=$answer'>$answer</a>";
    }
    $t .= '</ul>';
    return $t;
  }
Hopefully the above gives the general idea.